Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Monday, April 16, 2007

Typing Catalan

Catalan is a co-official language along with Spanish in the region on the Eastern edge of Spain. It uses the same alphabet as Spanish except it has no ñ and adds the digraph l·l (ela geminada).

OS X 10.3 had a Catalan keyboard layout which was identical to Spanish-ISO except for the flag icon. This seems to be no longer present in my 10.4. From my iDisk you can download the Catalan folder, which contains the .keylayout file and the .icns file with the right flag. The layout is almost the same as Spanish-ISO. The middle dot · (U+00B7) which is the standard for producing l·l is at shift + 3. But also included are ŀ (U+0140) and Ŀ (U+013F) at option + o and option + shift + o, in case you want to use these versions for local printing or similar purposes.

5 comments:

You put the two files in Home/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout/login, go to System Preferences/International/Input Menu, check the box for the new layout (plus the box for "show input menu in Finder"), then select the new layout in the "flag" menu at the top right of the Finder, and type away

You put the files in the folder as it is. "logout/login" is shorthand for going to the Apple menu, then down to the last item "Logout....", and then logging back in again. Or you can probably restart with the same effect.